'I'm waiting for riots in the streets'

Britain is at war over rubbish. Exasperated householders are attacking refuse collectors and stealing their neighbours' bins. What's going on? Why can't we change our dirty habits? And since when was waste such an emotive issue anyway? Jon Henley reports

It's starting to get nasty out there. In Preston, the Lancashire Evening Post reports, refuse collectors have recently come under a barrage of abuse from householders furious at "changes to the way their rubbish is collected". In some cases, it appears, residents have hurled burst and stinking bin bags, forcing bin men to flee.

In Lynn, west Norfolk, according to the Lynn News, long-suffering refuse operatives have been "verbally and physically abused at least three times in the past month". Residents angry that overfull wheelie bins are not being emptied have been warned in no uncertain terms to cease attacking bin men or face prosecution.

In normally staid Cannock, meanwhile, the Birmingham Post relates that decent, law-abiding family men, unable to cope now the council has switched to fortnightly collections, have been seen stealing into their neighbours' gardens at dead of night and nicking their wheelie bins. "It's like something out of Mad Max," says resident Paul Nicholls. "Every man for himself, scavenging for an extra bin."

We are in the grip, it would appear, of a national crisis. "I'm waiting for the riots in the streets," Doretta Cocks of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, which has grown from nothing to 22,000 highly vocal members in the space of three years, says ominously. "Though in fact, in some places we've already had them. An awful lot of people are very, very angry."

The object of all this ire, rather oddly, is household waste: how we collect it, how we dispose of it, how much of it we reuse. The trouble is, we're rubbish at rubbish. Or at least, we were. In 2000, we were bottom of the European league table: only Portugal and Greece dumped more stuff in holes in the ground (the technical term is landfill) than we did. We were recycling barely 5% of what we threw out; the likes of Holland, Germany and Switzerland were at 60%.

Over the past few years, however, stimulated by the prospect of swingeing £180m-a-year EU fines and dire warnings that if we carry on as we are, all of our island's landfill sites will be completely full within the next eight or nine years, we have started to get a bit better. Unfortunately, it's proving to be a painful process.

"I'm afraid change is unpopular," says Phillip Ward, director of the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap - get it?), the government's chief advisory body on the issue. "We're moving from an easy, familiar system where we just slung everything into a sack and once a week someone came and took it away for us - we neither knew nor cared where - to one where we actually have to do something. Some people will always find that difficult, for whatever reason."

Judging by the media coverage, to say that some people are finding it difficult may be something of an understatement. The following, for example, is a by no means complete list of the principle rubbish rage incidents reported by the conservative press in recent weeks:

· In Broxbourne, Herts, the local council has begun rationing households to one officially approved, free purple bin bag a week and is charging 28p for each extra one; residents who continue to use black bags face a possible £1,000 fine.

· Mid-Sussex council, for its part, has employed "snoopers to sift through residents' rubbish" and see exactly how much they throw away. "It's a gross invasion of privacy," fumes one opposition councillor.

· In Bolton, Zoe Watmough has been fined £275 for daring to put her rubbish out the day before it was due to be collected.

· Poor Katie Shergold of Warminster, Wiltshire, has been told her bin was too heavy to be emptied because collectors could not move it with two fingers.

· Plucky June Key, 80, who lives in Bolton-by-Bowland, Lancashire, is now supposed to drag her wheelie bin "half a mile down a steep hill" for collection by the cold, uncaring operatives of Ribble Valley council. "I don't know how I'm supposed to manage," says June. "I'm too old."

· Gareth Corkhill of Whitehaven, Cumbria, has been fined £225 because his bin was too full and its lid raised by four inches (or seven - there is some dispute). It would have been considerably cheaper, Gareth complained, just to "dump the rubbish in the garden and get done for fly-tipping".

· And in the ultimate affront to all right-thinking Englishmen, Colin Harrold, a war veteran, was ordered to pay £70 by Scarborough council after he was foolish enough to "put his rubbish out in the wrong colour bag".

Why, though, have we suddenly become so inordinately touchy about what happens to our waste? Why is rubbish, of all things, the new hobbyhorse of middle England? In part, suggests Cocks, because one of the marks of a civilised society is its capacity to deal with its waste. In part, too, because refuse collection is just about the one service used by every household in a borough; draconian new collection schemes tend to be seen merely as an attempt to get away with doing less in return for an already exorbitant council tax bill.

In part, also, because we do not take kindly to being told what to do at the best of times - and never by town hall officials. "We used to be clients," she observes persuasively, "and the council was there to provide a service. Now we're the persecuted. We're an easy target, you see. And all we want to do is get rid of our rubbish. It can't be that difficult, can it?"

In fact, though, rubbish has reached the top of our collective agenda principally because boroughs, driven by government targets and financial penalties for failing to meet them, find themselves having to substantially increase the amount this country recycles. Having raised that proportion to 33% in eight years, Britain - along with the rest of the EU - is now looking at a target of recycling 50% of its household waste by 2020. That means sending a lot less to landfill, which means changing people's habits.

Now there are, of course, many ways to change people's habits. You can inform them of the benefits of a new behaviour pattern, and trust that their rapid comprehension and generous goodwill will induce them to cooperate by recycling more of their paper, glass, cans, cardboard, plastic and food and garden waste than they do at present.

Then, when everyone who is willing to cooperate is doing so, you have to address the change-averse, by obliging them to recycle more. One obvious and highly cost-effective way to do this, local authorities argue, is to take steps to constrain the amount of residual, ie non-recyclable, waste that householders produce and that you collect. This is the stage that many English local authorities have now reached. Some of them (see Broxbourne, above) have begun providing smaller or fewer bags for residents' landfill rubbish. Others (nearly half in fact; around 180 authorities at the last count) have moved instead to what is known in the waste trade as AWC, or Alternate Weekly Collection.

As the name suggests, this implies that they now collect recyclables only one week, and non-recyclables only the next. In both cases, a whole lot of new rules are attached to the scheme in order to make sure it works. For householders who don't recycle as much or as sensibly as they might, that unfortunately means being landed, in the worst instances, with an overflowing, malodorous and maggot-infested bin. Plus, if they're really lucky, a fine.

For some people, this is self-evidently a national scandal. "It's a national scandal," says Cocks, whose campaign is based on public health concerns and dedicated to eradicating the scourge of AWC. "In public health terms we're moving back to the middle ages. In this climate we need a weekly collection of all waste otherwise you get maggots, flies, rats, the lot. I've had horror stories: one man had to use a blowtorch to get the maggots off his driveway. This country first introduced weekly refuse collections under the Public Health Act of 1875 precisely to break the breeding cycle of the house fly; now we're getting rid of them. It's beyond absurd."

For others, it's the only way forward. "The bin fairy is dead," proclaims a breezy Paul Bettison, Tory leader of Bracknell Forest borough council and, as chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, the nation's number one bin baron (or, if you prefer, trash tsar). "From now on we're all going to have to do a little bit of her work, and that's all there is to it. And in any case, the maggot problem is almost invariably exaggerated."

Bettison relates, with some relish, the entertaining story of a mystery series of photos of wheelie bins overrun with flies and maggots that appeared in his local newspaper soon after Bracknell Forest first introduced AWC. "We had a young ranger on the team who had a degree in entymology or some such," Bettison says, "and he had a good look at the pictures and he said, 'Those are not the maggots of any fly found in Great Britain.'

"So he investigated further, and he found that they were in fact a breed of maggot particularly favoured by fishermen. So this householder had gone out and bought a load of maggots from the bait shop, and emptied them into his wheelie bin. Just goes to show the lengths some people will go to avoid change. It was just the same when we introduced wheelie bins, mind: I got more hate mail that summer than I've ever had before or since."

According to Bettison, the key to the problem is good communication, and an understanding that one solution will not fit all circumstances. "AWC has been shown to boost recycling rates by 30%," he says. "It won't work everywhere; it may not be appropriate in areas with a very high proportion of flats, multiple occupancy, that kind of thing. But where it is appropriate you just need to educate people properly. Look, anyone calls us up to complain they can't fit all their rubbish in their non-recyclables bin, we offer to send someone round and empty it onto a tarpaulin in their garden, show them what they could have recycled. They don't have to do it very often."

But still, some council behaviour has been a tad over the top, wouldn't you say? Not exactly guaranteed to engender the full and willing cooperation of the great British public.

At Wrap, Ward accepts part of the problem is that, as it so often is when rapid change is introduced, "not always done in the optimum way". Waste recycling in Britain, he stresses, is still very much a work in progress: "You have to realise we had no stock of people who knew how to do it. A lot of mistakes have been made along the way." Nor has it necessarily helped, he acknowledges, that some 300 different local authorities, all independent and all with their own ideas, are in charge.

Nowhere is what Ward calls this "confusing patchwork of exactly what is collected, when, and in what receptacles" more evident than in one corner of north London. On the boundary between the boroughs of Islington and Hackney, Southgate Road is a fine street: busy, but not excessively so; big handsome houses, not all converted into flats; a couple of decent-looking pubs. And outside every front door, a magnificent display of assorted bins, bags and recycling boxes.

On the Hackney side, there are green boxes (paper, glass, etc), blue boxes (kitchen waste), and black bin bags or dustbins (other refuse), all for collection on Tuesdays. Plus brown wheelie bins (garden waste, alternate Tuesdays). Friends of the Earth last week dubbed Southgate Road "the most confusing street in the country for waste collection".

Mark Penbury, one resident, agrees: "It is a bit of a nightmare," he says. "You want to do the right thing, but people inevitably get muddled and put stuff in the wrong bin, or leave it out on the wrong day, then it gets left there and stinks. I think it could be made a bit easier." Agnes, from Poland, is more forthright: "It's completely crazy. How do they expect people to do it right? And of course, you make a mistake, you can't argue with them. No way."

It's the kind of situation that drives Cocks mad. Most people, she believes, now understand that we need to recycle more, for economic as well as environmental reasons (according to Bettison's figures, the UK sends as much rubbish to landfill as the 18 EU countries with the lowest landfill rates combined, and every tonne of waste that gets recycled in future will save local authorities as much as £80 in landfill taxes and fees).

"Most of us are on board," Cocks says. "Most of us are prepared to do our bit. But I can't tell you the number of emails I get from people saying they're giving up - they're afraid of being fined, they don't understand the rules, they've been upset once too often, they can't use their back garden because of the swarm of flies round the rubbish bins. It's all too complicated, and too fiercely enforced. People end up driving their rubbish to the tip or the recycling centre themselves - how environmentally friendly is that? They're trying to educate us into change, but they're ending up alienating us."

The bin baron's riposte is typically robust. "To those who say they can't do it," says Bettison, "I say they have to. The days of easy waste disposal are over. No change is not an option. To those who say it's too complicated, I say it really isn't rocket science. To those who say waste food smells, if you've got a garden, there are ways of reducing kitchen waste to little more than water, at home. It all just takes a bit of extra effort, that's all - and it should even lead to lower council tax bills."

Across at Wrap, Defra adviser Ward promises that things will get easier. Wrap is about to start a major public consultation process around just what constitutes a good recycling service, with the aim not only of "really making it work for everyone" but convincing sceptics that materials really are being recycled, not secretly dumped.

"And we need more uniformity," he says. "We need to refine further exactly what is collected for recycling, and coalesce around maybe five or six different models. There are too many at present; it is confusing." But to approach future recycling targets, he warns, "more motivation, more incentivisation" is going to be needed. We could soon be looking at pay-as-you-throw systems and, once recycling has really taken off, even at once-a-month residual rubbish collections. That, I imagine, really will be fun.